Most examples of SLF4J/Logback you can find on the Internet are about how web applications are configured. But if you have a command line or JavaFX application, you’ll require a different setup. Most probably, you want a local ‘logback.xml’ that is located in your application’s folder or in the home directory of the user. But how do you configure SLF4J/Logback for a Java SE application?

The good news is that there is already a tiny library that does the trick: ext4logback. It allows you simply to specify the location of your ‘logback.xml’ and does all the initialization for you. It also creates a default logback XML configuration if no file exists at startup.

Then you can just initialize the log in your applications ‘main’ method:

/**
* Starts the application.
*
* @param args
* Only optional argument is the 'logback.xml' file path and
* name. If no argument is provided it's assumed that the file name
* is 'logback.xml' and it's in the current directory.
*/
public static void main(final String[] args) {
try {
// Initializes Logback by reading the XML config file.
// If the file does not exist, it will be created with some defaults.
// This is a convenience method that directly uses the main method's arguments.
new LogbackStandalone().init(args, new NewLogConfigFileParams("your.app.package", "myapp"));
LOG.info("Application running...");
// Your code goes here...
System.exit(0);
} catch (RuntimeException ex) {
ex.printStackTrace(System.err);
System.exit(1);
}
}